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Whatsapp didn't have end-to-end encryption until April 2016.

The app used to cost €0.89 per year (which I guess was $1 at the time).

I'd be surprised if Facebook had bought WhatsApp looking for revenue. Even if the service is operating at a loss, it's still providing FB the messages (at the very least, their metadata) and personal data of two billion people.

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How will they get any messages if they are end to end encrypted?

To be fair, I don't think they get much value from encrypted content. This doesn't mean they can't log every single thing you do with a timestamp attached to it. Privacy and anonymity are not the same thing.

Adding a bit to this the contents of the message are E2E encrypted but the metadata is probably still available (sender, receiver, timestamp, etc). FB probably already has the phone numbers of most of users in WhatsApp and can use the metadata to make inferred decisions about those users.

Yes, they also get location (coarse or fine), media type (text chat, voice or video call), duration, any attachments sent (probably including file type, name and size, and frequency of contact, - all timestamped as you say.

Interesting! My guess is FB has built a microservice ecosystem for Whatsapp to call home with all this data.

All it would take them is one software update.

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